How To Reach Us

Myth of the Flat Earth

I suppose you can find someone
who believes almost any idea, no matter how crazy it is.Conspiracy theories abound.There are those who say we didn’t land on the
moon.Then of course there are the
abductions by aliens.And it appears
that there really are a few who think the earth is flat.

Although a very few on the fringe
believe in a flat earth, I’m appalled to hear those who disagree with the dogma
of Darwinism called “ignorant flat-earthers” whenever the creation-evolution
controversy comes up.

Some years ago the Historical
Society of Britain published a list of the ten most common historical
errors.Among these was the notion that
people used to believe that the earth was flat—especially medieval
Christians.However, with very few
exceptions, no educated person from the third century onward believed that the
earth was flat.Galileo and Copernicus,
for example, knew the earth was spherical.The realization that the earth is round goes back at least to the 6th
century BC with the Greek mathematician Pythagoras.People have long had abundant evidence of the
sphericity of the earth from observations of the moon and planets.For example, viewing a ship sailing toward
the horizon, the curvature of the earth could be seen when first the hull would
drop out of sight, and then the masts would sink below the horizon.

Just where did the notion come
from that people thought the earth was flat?

In 1828 Washington Irving, author
of stories such as “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle” invented
a caricature of Christopher Columbus as appearing before a counsel of
theologians, all of whom believed that the earth was flat.This fictionalized account of the meeting at
Salamanca (Spain) in 1491 pictured a gallant Columbus defending the facts of science
against the superstition of a self-righteous crowd of hooded inquisitors.

On the heels of Irving’s book,
Antoine-Jean Letronne claimed in his 1834 book On the Cosmographical Ideas of the Church Fathers that
medieval theologians taught that the earth was flat.This supposedly serious work began finding
its way into school texts in the 1860s.Letronne was strongly antireligious and did his best to discredit
Christianity as ignorant superstition.

This idea was repeated by
Englishman John William Draper in 1874 in his book History of the Conflict between
Religion and Science.This was a
diatribe against the Roman Catholic Church in which Draper stated that the fall
of the Roman Empire happened when “the affairs
of men fell into the hands of ignorant and infuriated ecclesiastics, parasites,
eunuchs, and slaves.”

In 1896 Andrew Dickson White, who was
founder and president of the nation’s first secular university, Cornell,
published a book which portrayed Christians as defenders of ignorance who were at
war with enlightened secularists.He made sure the fictitious account found its
way into school texts, encyclopedias, and even into supposedly serious
scholarship.

The idea of Christianity as being at war
with science for hundreds of years is false.Indeed, most of the founders of modern science were Christians.The warfare has been between materialistic,
atheistic science and science which includes a Creator, largely during the last
100 years or so.The mantra of
Christians pushing a belief in a flat earth persists as a good opportunity to
discredit belief in creation.

In spite of the efforts of a number of
scholars over many years, and correct accounts of the Columbus affair being published in a number
of encyclopedias, the idea of people (especially Christians) believing in a
flat earth persists.I hope this article
sheds some light on the subject.